Who is more likely to be lying: the feds and the pharmaceutical companies, or the millions of individuals who attest to the benefits of medical marijuana? The answer to that question is glaringly obvious. Based upon the results of a wide variety of polls, the American public knows the answer to that question as well.

Marijuana prohibition, and the war on drugs in general, has been one of the most damaging public policies in American history. However, the feds aren’t any more competent on any other issue than they are on drugs. They have a woeful record across the board. The problem with federal control is that Washington D.C. is hopelessly out-of-touch with the needs and the wants of the people. Outsourcing power to unaccountable federal regulators on medicine or anything else necessarily results in catastrophic consequences.

That is why the founding fathers meticulously designed the Republic to limit centralized power. They wanted to give power to the states and the people, rather than a monolithic bureaucracy. The founding fathers would have never stood for federal marijuana prohibition. Check out the words of James Madison from Federalist #43 for a clue on how the founders may have attempted to remedy the drug war if it happened in their day:

Should an unwarrantable measure of the federal government be unpopular in particular States, which would seldom fail to be the case, or even a warrantable measure be so, which may sometimes be the case, the means of opposition to it are powerful and at hand. The disquietude of the people; their repugnance and, perhaps, refusal to co-operate with the officers of the Union; the frowns of the executive magistracy of the State; the embarrassments created by legislative devices, which would often be added on such occasions, would oppose, in any State, difficulties not to be despised; would form, in a large State, very serious impediments; and where the sentiments of several adjoining States happened to be in unison, would present obstructions which the federal government would hardly be willing to encounter.

Are those the words of a person who would have supported armed SWAT teams raiding the private property of people for smoking a plant that is legal to consume under state law? Of course not.

That is why the Tenth Amendment Center works to revive the Republic of James Madison where state-level resistance was commonplace. We have had great success doing this on many issues across the political spectrum, but medical marijuana counts as one of our greatest triumphs because it is very difficult to demagogue. It is not easy to make a racist, terrorist or an extremist out of a sick child desperate for an effective pain treatment.

The issue also perfectly demonstrates the dangerousness and the futility of unregulated federal power. The feds have tried for years to suppress this life-saving medicine from the general population. Thankfully, they have failed. But if they were successful in their bizarre crusade against health freedom, there would have been an untold amount of death and suffering needlessly inflicted upon the masses. The federal supremacists want a world where the state’s will is insuppressible with the ends justifying the means to get there. To their dismay, state and local resistance can put a serious damper on their totalitarian ambitions.

We cannot allow the federal supremacists’ dark vision to come to fruition. We must take matters into our own hands. The feds have shown a stubborn unwillingness to change their behavior. If they were capable of reforming themselves, they would have looked at all the data in favor of medical marijuana over the years and changed course. However, the exact opposite has happened. The feds have doubled down at every opportunity to increase their enforcement power. Although once a chronic pot user, President Obama continued the long-standing tradition of being ‘tougher on drugs’ than his predecessor.

The only compassionate way to make decisions on important issues like medical marijuana is individuals working through the states, rather than with the heavy hands of federal power. While state governments can certainly make reprehensible decisions, their record of negligence pales in comparison to their federal counterparts. There is also a way out for individuals in a system that properly respects state sovereignty. People can move from local and state oppression to a better place. When the feds dominate everyone in a top-down manner, they do not have that option.

This should be required reading in every classroom, every department of government, and every legislative body in the nation. The American individual has been so neutered, so shackled, so stripped of his constitutionally protected liberty and unalienable rights that our founding fathers would not even recognize the pathetic excuse for a country that we live in today. But thank heaven that nothing and eliminate the foundation they laid, -that of State supremacy over matters not delegated by the Constitution to the feds. If they would only retake that authority that is rightfully theirs, beginning with medical marijuana, and continuing with public lands that rightfully belong to the States. And onward from there to dozens of areas of federal over-reach.